This year looks like it's going to be an important milestone for SilverStripe. For not only does it mark the 10th anniversary of the company that brought us the CMS, SilverStripe Limited, but it's also the year in which work has begun on the first major release of the system since it's launch in 2007. SilverStripe 3.0 is still very early in its development but it's already looking very promising, potentially offering huge improvements such as versioned assets, a reworked templating system and better separation between the CMS and the underlying framework Sapphire among other things. However probably the most exciting improvement will be a completely new HTML5/jQueryUI admin interface.

The man in charge of designing the new UI is Felipe Skroski, creative director at SilverStripe Limited. With nearly 15 years of experience designing, marketing and project managing for the web, Felipe is well placed to lead the process, so I caught up with him to talk about SilverStripe 3, UI design and the future of content management.

The eagerly awaited SilverStripe 3 has been available in a stable state for a while now, it's even had a minor release in the form or 3.0.1. But how does it shape up when compared to it's long established predecessor, SilverStripe 2?

Having now had time to really have a play with it and even do some project work with it there are 2 statements swirling around my head. 1: SilverStripe 3 is absolutely awesome and 2: We won't be using SilverStripe 3 for complex production sites just yet . Confused? Let me explain.

Leaflet is a good open-source alternative to Google Maps. I followed the instructions given in the Leaflet quick start guide (http://leafletjs.com/examples/quick-start.html), with a few adaptations to Silverstripe CMS. No custom icon, no additional layer, no customized css, no fancy feature : only the basic options to plot several locations on an interactive map.